Road Rage: How Much Worse Is Florida Away From Home?

Florida basketball isn't even close to .500 when they have to wear away jerseys.

Hotel beds aren't as comfortable.

The crowds aren't as nice to you. Your surroundings aren't familiar. You have to spend much more time than normal on a plane and on a bus. It's what you sign up for in college basketball but quite frankly, it can't be very much fun. 

Florida basketball seems to really hate traveling this season. Obviously, road games are naturally tougher than matchups in your own arena. However, this season, the Gators have taken that to an extreme. 

Away from Gainesville altogether, UF is 7-7. On the surface, that doesn't seem too bad for a team in a fairly deep SEC. 

However, five of those games were neutral site contests. In games where both teams had to travel, Florida fares pretty well. Coach Mike White's group is 4-1 in those games, as three of them came in the Charleston Classic, an early-season tournament that the Gators won.

But UF's last neutral-site game was before Christmas, on Dec. 21. Now, 71 days later, White's team has only won three games not inside the O'Connell Center. One of those came against lowly Vanderbilt, who is a woeful 1-15 in the conference. In true road games in the 2019-'20 season, Florida is 3-7. 

But in Gainesville? 

Maybe it's the rowdy reptiles. Maybe it's sleeping in your own bed or maybe the Gators just play extra hard when they see Billy Donovan's name written in cursive, but this team is completely different when it gets to wear white uniforms. More often than not, home games for Florida look a lot like this:

Again in a deep SEC, UF is an impressive 11-3 when it plays on the court that now has Billy Donovan's name on it. And of those three losses, two of them came against current top-10 squads (No. 2 Baylor and No. 6 Florida State). As often as it seems that this team has had awful games, really only one against a weak opponent happened in Exactech Arena. 

Florida inexcusably blew a 10-point halftime lead against Mississippi State in late January. It was one of UF's worst losses of the year, looking so dominant in the first half and then collapsing at a remarkable rate in the second half. 

However, outside of that dud and weak showings against two upper-echelon teams in the country, the orange and blue have defended home court well. The reason for so much disappointment in this team has much more to do with performances in other arenas, particularly in the SEC. 

Out of those seven road losses, five of them have come inside the conference. None of those five teams except Kentucky (Missouri, LSU, Ole Miss and Tennessee) are ranked. And outside of the LSU loss which came down to the final moments, these games were well in hand. The Tennessee game is the only other one that wasn't a double-digit loss. 

When UF plays away from home, it often ends up like this:

That has made watching this team and trying to figure out what it really is borderline impossible. You expect teams to play better at home than on the road, but this is on steroids. 

This is the difference between a team that makes you feel like it may dance deep into march, and a team that has two left feet.